


Saudade

by olddarkmachine



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, CATCH ME MAKIN Y'ALL SAD FIRST DOE, F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 10:41:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12167301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olddarkmachine/pseuds/olddarkmachine
Summary: A deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.AKA the one where Gajeel never came home after the Bloodman fight.





	Saudade

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to [@bluuesparrow](http://bluuesparrow.tumblr.com/) and inspired by her [amazing artwork.](http://moineau-bleu.tumblr.com/post/164124802380/good-golly-all-i-can-accomplish-these-days-are)

The heat of the sun warmed her skin almost as much as the touch the man next to her did. Slow, burning lava flowed through her veins as she felt a nose nuzzle into her hair, causing her to wiggle closer to the chest that she rested her cheek on. A purr rolled from her throat as she closed her eyes to bask in the warmth. Lips ghosted across her hair in a chaste kiss and stirred the strands of her cornflower blue hair. A strong heartbeat pulsed beneath her ear in a steady rhythm that made up her favorite song. Even though she couldn’t see his smile, she could feel the upturn of it against the crown of her head. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt as if the grip would keep him there forever.

If you asked Levy, this would be heaven.

“It’s so good to see you,” she hummed low in her throat. It was the only sound around them other than their breath.

“I wasn’t gone that long, Shrimp,” Gajeel’s voice rumbled through his chest as he started to absentmindedly play with her hair. Blue strands pulled lazily through fingers as he ran them through it, admiring the way it shimmered in the light.

“It felt like forever.”

A distant spark of a painful memory tugged in her chest at the thought of the word.  _Wait, how long had he been gone?_

Her head bobbed with the laughter that moved Gajeel’s chest.

“It was just a weekend job. I was back before my side of the bed was cold.” That was right, he had only gone a town over to help a shopkeeper get rid of some excess iron he’d had lying around. A sharp pang of sorrow rippled across her heart, knocking the breath from her momentarily.

_If that was true, why did it seem so long?_

A shadow passed over the sun that had been heating the meadow they were laying in, coloring the backs of her eyelids with inky darkness instead of the brilliant red they’d been just a moment again. Her grip on his shirt tightened, scared to open her eyes as a memory on the edge of her consciousness started to rage against the confines of the box she’d pushed it into. There was a sudden chill in the air as Gajeel pressed another kiss to the top of her head.

“Gajeel, what’s today?” She asked, her voice barely loud enough even for her to hear, but she knew his dragon sense would pick it up.

_I’ve been looking for a good plot of land to call my final resting spot._

His hand fell from his hair as he dropped his arm down onto her shoulders and hugged her close to his chest. Desperation settled into her bones at the touch as the moment of silence stretched between them.

_My body is getting sucked in!_

Blood started to rush in her ears as dread created a pit in her stomach as Gajeel continued to sit in silence. Something about the way he held her and ignored the question felt wrong. Tendrils of memory were licking at the corners of her minds eye, and disjointed pieces of it started to flash against the backdrop of her darkened eyelids.

Blood and iron.

A swirling vortex of absolute darkness.

The bitter saltiness of tears.

_You taught me what it means to love._

“Gajeel.” Levy’s voice cracked as it wrapped around the name as if it was a fragile thing. “What’s today?”

His sigh tickled over the top of her nose and his arm loosened around her shoulders.

“April 3rd, X792.”

_I really did want to walk with you, side-by-side, forever._

The scream erupted from her mouth as she sat up abruptly, knocking the book that had still been on her lap onto the ground with a soft thud. Her eyes tried to refocus as her hand pressed over her heart as if that would quiet the way it crashed against her chest. A light breeze blew her hair around her face in the dusk of the evening from where she sat on the porch overlooking the streets of Magnolia. It had cooled off as the sun had started to set, and Levy pulled the oversized shirt that had fallen from one of her shoulders tighter around her. Her lungs ached as they tried to drag air in through the gasps caused by the vividness of the dream. She longed for the phantom warmth she’d felt in it, reveling in the feel of the fingers she could still imagine ghosting through her hair.

A tear fell onto her naked thigh before she even realized she’d been crying.

It had been a little over a year since Gajeel had disappeared, pulled into the twisting, angry blackness that was made up of Bloodman’s wrath and final dredges of energy. In the first few months that had followed his disappearance and their win over the Spriggan 12, the guild and thrown all their resources into scouring every corner of the world that they could reach in hopes of finding him. About six months passed before the guild turned their energies towards mourning him, most– if not all– of the teams turning their attention onto other jobs that didn’t involve chasing a ghost. Levy never gave up, taking jobs that would take her to the deepest and darkest expanses of Earth, and throwing herself into old texts that delved into magic older than time itself.

When a year had passed, Levy’s friends had sat her down to ask if there was anything they could do to help her move on. It had ended with her throwing them from her and Gajeel’s home with a solid bar of iron script holding the door shut to them. The only other person that had still helped her in her fruitless search was Pantherlily, but even his eyes had started to fill with helpless despair whenever he’d returned from another search.

She rubbed the salt laced moisture from her face with her fist, aware of how she must have looked. It was around the time strangers started to fix her with looks of sorrow filled pity that she started to avoid mirrors, knowing she’d only see the bruise like circles under her eyes and the ghostly pallor of her skin. They marked her as a grieving widow without the benefit of a ring around her finger, which almost made her loss worse. All the possibilities of the future they could have had had slipped through her fingers like sand, and blew away with the wind of passing time. But she wouldn’t give up.

Couldn’t give up.

He was alive, and she would find him. If she needed to cross time, space and search through different lifetimes, she would find him.

Her breathing evened out as her tears dried before she leant down to pick up the leather bound tome that had landed page down on the ground. It had arrived in the mail for her, a gift from Lily who had found it buried in the depths of a hidden temple that had been forgotten by history itself. According to the note, he wasn’t quite sure what she would find within it, but felt she needed to have it. That was three days ago, and she’d been lost in the ancient text since. Abandoning what little sleep she already got, she’d gone to work analyzing the foreign language it was written in, piecing together the languages she did know in order to decipher the alien alphabet that would help her read what was written within it.

It was as the light of the sun started to bleed over the buildings of Magnolia that morning when she finally cracked the language, the words swirling around her as she devoured them. They enveloped her with open arms and welcomed her into the book’s world of curses and dimensions.  The people who had written it believed in wizardry as if it were a religion, explaining away the curses as a vengeful, godly pestilence and magic as almighty miracles.

She placed the book back on her lap, leaving it open to the page it had landed on. When she’d fallen into her sleep, she’d been struggling to make sense of the incantation that was sprawled across the delicate paper. Something about the words with their bleeding black ink that had caused the hair on her arms stand on end before her exhaustion had settled over her and pushed her deep within the dream. As she looked over them now, her fingers tracing delicately over the long forgotten language, she couldn’t help but feel like there was something different about them.

In fact, she knew there was something different about them.

Her eyebrows stitched together as she leant closer to inspect the words, picking apart the syllables and snaking lines that came together to create them. They almost looked faded against the yellowing page, losing the depth in the blackness of their original ink. Only one word stood out amongst the rest.

It looked like it was writhing with the darkness of the same visceral blackness of the vortex that had taken Gajeel from her. The weight of it was dead on her tongue as if it was a stone. As if on its on volition, her mouth opened and let it fall from her lips.

 **Inferis**.

Before the hiss of the ‘s’ could dissipate into the evening air, the word on the page exploded into spidering legs of murky darkness that swallowed the other words surrounding it. She didn’t even have the time to react as the viscous ink shot outside of the surface that had imprisoned it and latched onto her hands. A sharp stinging shock of a thousand pinpricks raced across her skin where it held on and started to devour the surrounding tissue. She was stunned into silence as she watched the black void racing up her arms and felt the deep tug behind her belly button as she was pulled forward into it.

_My body is getting sucked in!_

It was the memory of Gajeel’s voice screaming against the strange tug of the portal that broke through her paralyzed senses just long enough for her to realize it was too late. Her forearms had already disappeared into the darkness, and the ink had already started to spill over her shoulders as it continued its assault.

_You taught me what it means to love._

His voice was the last she heard before the darkness blinded her.

***

“C’mon now, Lev,” Gajeel’s voice tickled the shell of her ear as he pulled her closer into his chest and nuzzled the hair there. “It’s time to get up.”

“‘m not ready,” Levy moaned as pushed her face into his arm that pillowed her head. His laugh sent goosebumps racing down the back of her neck. It was one of her favorite sounds in the world.

“We have to get going.” The whisper danced across her earlobe before he pressed a firm kiss to her pulse just below it. She hummed at the contact, pressing back into his chest and enjoying how solid he felt behind her. His lips continued to press their way down her neck and to her shoulder where they nipped gently at the skin before they returned to her ear.

_“Wake up, Levy.”_

She awoke with the sound of a painful first breath and choked on the air she’d so greedily tried to drink in. It felt as if her lungs were trying to burst free of her ribcage as she coughed until she heaved, dispelling nothing but spittle and bright yellow bile. The ground beneath her cheek was cold and hard, small rocks cutting into her flesh. Her entire body ached with the pain of being thrust through a portal to who knows where. With shaking arms, she pushed herself off her stomach and onto her knees as her eyes darted across the landscape that surrounded her.

The forest around her smelled of death and despair. Everything was covered in different shades of muted greys and blacks. The trees that encircled the meadow she was in were twisted and gnarled in a menacing way, and the decaying bark was flaking away. It looked as if they were made of the darkness that had sucked her into the book, and suddenly a thrill zipped down her spine. Her hands trembled as she brought them up to her face to inspect them for any signs of the black portal that had sunk its teeth into her skin and brought her here. The only mark on them was a scratch across the back of her right hand that she presumed was her fall.

All things considered she’d faired pretty well, and though her body was still reeling against the trauma of being pulled to a different dimension, she didn’t feel as if anything had been majorly injured. Pushing her way up onto her shaky legs, she was able to get a better idea of her surroundings and the brown leather of the book’s cover caught her eye. The tome was laying just at the edge of the meadow near a path that cut through the petrified forest. With a steadying breath, she walked towards it and gingerly picked it up.

“Alright, you,” she said, addressing the book. “No more funny business.” Carefully she peeled the cover back to reveal an empty page. A startled sound escaped her lips as she turned it to find the next page empty.

And the next.

And the next.

 _Well that’s just great_ , she thought bitterly before she slammed the leather bound tome shut. Something about the silence of the forest was calming as she tried to search her mind for what she could possibly do to get out of the predicament she had found herself in. Screwing her eyes shut, she pulled the book into her chest and thought, attempting to pull up a carbon copy in her mind’s eye of the pages in the book when they’d been filled with words. Her growl of exasperation tore through the silence as her mind came up empty.

_“You’ve got this, Lev.”_

The memory of Gajeel’s voice steadied her. Even though he wasn’t there, he still managed to ground her. She sucked in another breath before she opened her eyes and faced the path before her. A phantom tug pulled her forward onto the cracked dirt road that carved through the trees. Without any other choice, she started to follow where it led, trying to fight back the growing sense of unease that prickled in her veins.

As she walked she tried to make note of the different twisted shapes of the trees in hope she’d be able to find her way back if needed, though something ominous in the back of her mind told her that she wouldn’t be going back. She trudged through the dead forest in search of something, anything that might show any sign of life.

Any sign of him.

_“That’s my girl.”_

The lack of light left Levy unsure of how long she walked amongst the bleak trees yet she pressed on, led by nothing but the phantom voice in her head. Every time she felt as if she was about to give up, it urged her forward with the same gruff enthusiasm Gajeel had whenever he cheered her on in tasks she didn’t think she could complete. She pulled the book closer as if it would do something to alleviate the burning emptiness in her chest that plagued her.

“Gajeel,” she whispered like a prayer. Levy held onto his name as if it was a life preserve keeping her head above water. When it felt as if she was about to slip beneath the suffocating surface of the despair that oozed from the forest, she grasped at it to keep her afloat.

Her feet were raw and her legs screamed with fatigue by the time she came across the next clearing. It had happened so suddenly, she hadn’t even noticed the way the trees opened up at first. Familiarity pricked at her nerves as she took in the shape of it. The meadow looked identical to the one she’d spent so long walking away from and a single drop of fear froze her veins as it spread through her body. She felt the scream that started to crawl it’s way from deep within her and threatened to rip itself from her throat. It was then that she heard the faintest sound just to her right.

“Levy.”

The voice that wrapped around it sounded so fragile and weak, and yet it felt as if she’d been hit by a train. Another soft mewl of her name forced her to turn towards the man softly saying her name and her voice caught in her throat.

Pressed against one of the trees, Gajeel sat on the ground with his body slumped forward against on of his knees that he had raised in a makeshift arm rest. His face was obscured from her view but the way her body cried out for him was the only confirmation she needed that it was him and not the ghost of him that had haunted her every waking moment. Ever since he’d been pulled into the black pit, he had been around every corner and accompanied her every thought and now there he was. Just within her grasp. Her heart ricocheted within her chest as she tried to drink him in.

His black hair looked even more wild as it stuck in matted disarray around his head. It fell over his shoulders and covered his bare torso that showed more scars than she’d remembered. Dirt was crusted along his skin, and his pants were torn, but he was whole. And he was there. Gajeel breathed her name again, lost in a memory as he was unaware of the woman he called out to standing several feet away. The sound of her name squeezed the air from her lungs and her arms dropped to her sides. Free from her hold, the book fell to the ground with a harsh thud that split the silence between them.

She saw Gajeel’s shoulders tense at the sound before he unleashed a guttural snarl filled with warning as his head snapped up. The crimson fire in his eyes scorched her insides as he glared straight through her. His cheekbones stood out sharper than they had and the snarl that twisted his mouth made him look more animal than human. For a moment, Levy truly believed that he had a dragon housed within his bones. She couldn’t look away from the mesmerizing glint in his eyes, her mouth half open as she tried to catch her breath. That mere sight of him had shaken her down to her very core and left her insides raw and bare as his gaze continued to appraise her with the cautious nature of a cornered beast. A beat passed between them, ruby burning against honey as their gazes melded together.

“Gajeel,” she finally breathed. His name seemed to breath a new life into him and she watched as a shudder dragged through his body and shook the primal burn from his expression. Levy could pinpoint the exact moment he stopped staring through her and actually saw her. It felt as if the pieces of her life that had been scattered into disarray after his disappearance had suddenly aligned again, completing the hole that had been left in her chest.

“Levy!” The dragon slayer leapt from where he sat and crossed the distance between them in just three strides. Loud watery sobs filled the clearing and it took all of a few moments before she realized they were her own as Gajeel pulled her into his chest. Her arms wrapped around him and her fingers clutched at the skin of his back, searching for any other way to hold onto him in fear that he would disappear again. The insistent cadence of his voice as he repeated her name was the only thing that broke through the sounds tearing their way from deep within her. Strong hands grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back so he could look down at her.

Levy’s vision blurred as she looked up at him through her tears but she could see the crimson velvet his eyes had softened to as he took in her face. His own tears left streaks in the dirt that had stained his cheeks.

“My love,” she whispered as her trembling hand reached up to wipe the moisture from his face, earning a low contented sound from deep within his chest as he pressed into the touch. Gajeel’s eyes fluttered shut momentarily as he turned his face just enough so that he could press a kiss to your palm. Though her life had always revolved around words and their meanings, they failed her now.

“I have missed you so much.” His voice was rough with lack of use as he murmured into the junction where her hand met her wrist, reveling in her scent of lavender and ink. The world around them was on fire as everything she wanted to say waged a war within her. She didn’t even know how to begin to tell him the depth of how she’d missed him. Sliding her hand from his face and down to his neck, she pulled him down to her and pressed her mouth to his.

Levy filled the kiss with every feeling she had felt and every word she knew from her vast library of languages in hopes it would convey the way she had yearned for him. Her other hand joined its companion at the nape of Gajeel’s neck and she twisted her fingers into his black hair, eliciting a gasp from him. She took the opportunity to deep the kiss, throwing the weight of her love and the heaviness of the desperation she’d felt behind it. Breaths became ragged and tears mingled as she continued to paint him a picture of how much she’d missed him through the kiss.

He was the one to pull away first, only moving away enough to he could press his forehead against hers. Their breath danced together in the space between them. As soon as she looked up to meet his gaze, laughter bubbled up in her chest and she smiled for the first time since he’d gone.

“I never stopped looking for you,” she finally said, her voice full of mirth. He pressed another chaste kiss to her lips before he pulled away completely.

“Knew you wouldn’t, Shrimp.”

Suddenly, a white light spilled over the clearing, blinding them both. Gajeel’s arms wrapped around her in an attempt to shield her from the offending lumination. Light started to cling to them both, and warmth spread across their skin wherever it reached. Levy peeked around his shoulder to see the book still on the ground, emitting the brightness that had started to swallow them whole. Her smile rivaled that of the brightness of the light as she turned back towards him and placed a hand on his cheek. The light sparked and fizzled as it enveloped her fingers and nestled deep within his hair.

“C’mon, Gajeel,” she said. Their skin shone with the light as they were both completely engulfed in it. “Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this one shot and the artwork it was inspired by, please check out her [commissions](http://bluuesparrow.tumblr.com/post/165487380039/blues-commissions-contest-hello-my-sweet) :D Myself and a handful of other talented writers are taking part in a promo where for just $1 more you can get a 500 word minimum drabble along with your artwork from the writer of your choice!
> 
> UPDATE 10/4  
> Hey guys! ODM here, I'm doing a 12 Days of Christmas thing where I'm taking 12 prompts that I will post December 14-December 25! Completely free, minimum of 1k words, will write any pairing and any prompt with just a few rules in place. It will be dedicated to you and you'll even receive a digital copy! (Of course, you can remain anonymous too.)
> 
> Check out the information on [Tumblr!](https://theolddarkmachine.tumblr.com/post/166044384257/help-odm-needs-you) Deadline for prompts is 10/31 :)


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